- Email: [email protected]
At Panama
January, I9o8.]
.4t Panama.
27
At Panama." BY FULLERTON L. WALDO, F.R.G.S.
Lieut.-Col. Ge,~rge \V. Goethals, U. S. A., Cllief Fmgilleer of the Isthmian Caual Commission, rel)orted on December 4 to the \:\;ashington office of tile Comnlission that the total excavation for November was t,838,486 cubic yards, making a daily average for 24 working days of 76,6oo cubic yards, lgive cubic yards of earth and rock, such as the great ninety-five-ton thmvrus shovels grub u 1) at a single bite, after the side of a hill has been "shot" or blasted, weigh from seven to nine tons, so that it is safe to say timt a daily average of something like I2O,OOO tons is being hauled seaward on the rocking Western dunlp cars or being plowed off by the Lidgerwood unloaders from the dirt-trains into the abysmal reek of primeval morasses and the jungle. The l"rench, at their best, were taking out something like ~,5oo,ooo cubic yards a month, twenty years ago. So that in actual cubic yardage we are exceedip.g the achievement of our predecessors, and the prol)hecy, which a year ago seemed over-sanguine, that the canal would be ready for commemorative expositions at Los Angeles and New Orleans in 1913, bids fair to be fulfilled. One of the most interesting books that has ever been written ~m the Panama Canal is the Report, just issued, of the Canal Commission for the year ending June 3 ° , 19o 7 . The pictures bring the graphic exposition of the conditions nluch more nearly down to the present date (some bearing the legend Sel)tenlber Io, I9o7), and nlake plain the connection between paving and selfrespect in the cities; between the adequate housing of the work*A lecture delivered before the Franklin Institute, Friday, November a9th, t9c7.
a8
I~'aldo:
[J. F. I.,
ing-corps and a degree of contentment hitherto supposed to be unrealizable on the part of Northerners living in the tropics; bet w e e n an adequate supply of filtered water and mortality-rates that would be the pride of a New York or Philadelphia Board of Health. No before-and-after-taking advertisement could exhibit nlore sudden or surprising metamorphoses than thisAnnual Report represents, and the result of its perusal must be to establish unshakeably the confidence of the reader in the Work and in the men who are doing the work. If other evidence were needed that the dirt is flying and that the filth has flown,--that the Isthmus is livable for white men,--that while the great dam at Gatun slowly but surely rises against the chocolate torrent of the Chagres, and the giant cleft in the hills at Culebra grows steadily wider and deeper, the children are going to school and women are marketing nmch as they do at h o m e - - i f one wants additional evidence that the American community has transferred American institutions to the Isthmus little altered, one has only to read every week the pages of the Canal Record. There he will find the unbiased chronicle of the life of the thirty thousand people of~ the working community. He will learn there how the surveyors in the Chagres Valley have come upon a little French village under the bc/ucca vines and the white orchils, with machine shops whose clinking and purring tools have given place to the strident voices of the paroquets and the jabber of monkeys. H e will learn there of judges and lawyers soberly holding court for undesirable citizens and metitag out even-handed American justice. H e will find contract vs. day labor discussed, and the scores of a woman's bridge-whist club duly held up for emulation. H e will learn of Japanese teas and Spanish classes, baseball and bowling alleys, and Thanksgiving pumpkin pie. There are "letters from the line," about how small boys scraped the frost from the pipes of the cold-storage plant and snow-balled each other,--about a challenge to a walking match across the Isthmus, or the Continent, if you like, some 44 miles of distance,--about the establishment of fraternal orders, with much band music and lemonade. There is one wistful colunm of the names of those who are going back to God's own country by the constant shuttle of the steamships,--a wistfulness tempered by the welcome extended to those who are coming back to the Istlmms again, after the tong vacations granted every employee.
January, I9o8.]
A t Panama.
29,
It is good to read about all this, but it is still better to have been down there and to have seen for one's self how things are going, as it is the writers privilege to have been and to have seen, last winter. Those who have seen Dwight Elmendorf's lectures with theilaccessories of motion and color, need in addition little more tl{an six months of dry heat followed by six months of supersaturation, to realize what life at Panama is like. The ahonfinable climate that makes garden vegetables as difficult to raise as little children-that often pulls down the white man's capacity for "virtuous energizing" to the low level of the black man's vegetative existence--that brings green mold on books and ants into the woodwork, and makes taut fiddle-strings impossible--even this climate, if you live as Dr. Gorgas lives, who follows the rules and obeys. the laws of tropic nature,--becomes tolerable. That is the first thing, of course, that the new-comer broods about--he is obsessed by fear that the climate will sap and undernfine his energy an~t leave him a prey to Chagres fever or elephantiasis. How do the statistics of Dr. Gorgas' latest health report justify the apprehension ? "The sick rate for September," Dr. Gorgas reports, "was 27.78 per thousand, and for August 29.o2--a decrease o f nearly 2 for September as compared with August. The same rate for September, I9o6 , was 37 per thousand. "The number of employees on our rolls on the Ist of Septemberw.as the largest that has so far appeared on the rolls of the Commission--slightly over 4~,ooo. In September, I9O6, we had something over 28,ooo employees. Among these 28,000 employees we had i35 deaths, which gave us an annual death rate o f a little over 57. In September, I9o7, we had 4I,ooo employees, with 98 deaths, giving us an annual death rate of a little over 28 per thousand--quite a marked improvement. " A m o n g our 4,2oo American employees we had two deaths,. giving us an annual death rate of 5.71--about the same as last year. "In September, I9o5, the total population of the zone was 76,000, from which population we had 35 ° deaths, giving us an annual death rate of a little over 54 per thousand. In September, I9O7, the zone population was Io8,ooo, in which population we had 297 deaths, giving us an annual rate of a little over 32 per
.3 °
H"ahto:
[J. F. I.,
thousand, showing a very marked improvenmnt in the death rate, both of the laboring force and the general population. " N o case of either small-pox or yellow fever occurred on the zone during the month." So much for the health of the zone--that ten-mile wide strip which includes the axial line of the Canal and is deflected at either end to skip the cities of Colon and Panama, but not the American suburbs of these cities,--Cristobal and Ancon. Cristohal is a delightful place,--like Manhattan Beach, it is swept by ocean breezes, when there are any; it has an ice plant and cold storage and a steam laundry and a bakery of its own, and the cellarless houses reared on posts, and covered from top to battom with wire gauze against alzo/,hdcs and stegomyia--these houses, cleanly and airy. shed the tropic rains from their corrugated roofs, and the l)~Wous s~il beneath s~aks up the flooding waters, and there are 1> p, mkets f(~r standiug drainage where mosquito larv~ breed. A shell 1-~ad in front, and the indolent windmill-arms of the cocoanut pahns overhead, and the open roadstead of lnud-hrown shallow water, with the red and rnsted tramp steamers lying at anchor off the raihvav pier--this is the 'long-shore picture; and just behind you. beside the raihvav track, are the freight yards, and giant scare-crows of the coal unloaders, and the Mount Hope storehouses, partially destroyed by fire the first of last April. And there is the "Monkey Hill Cemetery," with red zinnias abloom, newly-christened Mount Hope, so that people will forget the horrid stcwies of the French regime, and how the crew of the daily dead-train dumped the corpses out of the coffins upon the hilMde, and sohl the coffins again. And beyond that still, is the mighty Reservoir. which Poultney Bigelow could not find, and where the launch named for him is tethered to the bank. The water-w~wks system of Colon, which this Mount Hope Reservoir supplies, is n~w complete. About five miles of sewer pipe were laid in the year covered by the Annual Report. Seventy-five house connections have been made with the water pipe, 4~4 service 1,~xes and ~e2 lneters installed. The Mount Hope Reserv~fir. which was completed in December, I9o6, has a capacity of 435,ooo,ooo gall,ms. In watering and paving the cities of Colon and Panama ~he United States has thus far expended $I,75o,ooo, which is t,-~ be reimbursed by the two municipalities from waterrates collected. I n the city of Panama last year some two and a-
January, I9o8.]
A i [~(tlt(tllt(t.
3I
half miles of water pipes were laid, 2,o93 houses were connected therewifll, two million vitrified brick from Dubuque, Iowa, were laid in the streets, and now Panama claims the proud distinction o f being the best-paved city between Buenos Ayres and the City of Mexico, with twenty gallons of water per (lay supplied for each of its inhai',itants---many of who,u have little or no use for it. Y,t C,21on. where much of tile land is only a matter of a few inches above the water, arm the soil is a seeping, porous sponge, dredges in the chamlel are doing most of the work. The dredging fleet coral)rises one of the old French ladder dredges, a fiveyard dipper dredge, and a sixteen-inch suction dredge; more recently, a sea-going suction dredge, like the big dredges in New York Harll~)r, has been doing yeoman service, addiug between three and f~ur lmndred tllousand cubic yards a month to the sum total. Before this recent acquisition, the excavation for the fiscal year at Colon was eleven hundred thousand cubic yards. At Gatun, where the railway line lnnst be relocated to swing clear of tile vast mass of tile dam, is one of the two great present centers of activity, the other being the heart of the Culel)ra cut. As everyb~My knows, this (lain at Gatun is what the schoolboy would call "the biggest ever." ~[tiS not really a dam; it is a hill or mole, ~r barrow of earth, such as the Ohio 1hound-builders would have clapped their hands to behold. For a mile and a-half in width it is to reach across the valley, clamping it from hill to hill, and its base a half-mile through, will obliterate the site of the ralnshackle, pahn-thatched, native village of Gatun, with its little g r a y Catholic church. The United States will lift those poor little sentry-box houses to the hills, or else rebuild before the village m(~ving-day. And by that great earth-barrow, whose dilnensions are only approached, but not equalled, by a couple of earth-dams in California, an immense lake will be created, as the whole world knows, with the top of the dam, a hundred yards wide, fifty feet above the surface of the water at the eighty-fivefoot level. Tile three locks at Gatun are in pairs; the present (limensions are Iooox~oo feet, and there is nmch talk of widening. On the •other side of the Isthmus this lock-flight is counterbalanced by the lift at Pedro Miguel and the two locks at La Boca. "File design is simple enough, and the engineering problem at Panama presents quantitative rather than qualitative difficulties. There
]ournal Franklin Inslilule, vol. clxv, January, I9o8
F l o o d of D e c e m b e r 8,1907, on t h e l i n e of tile F a n a m a R. i t . a t F a r a i s o .
F r e i g h t y a r d s at M o u n t H o p e . j u s t o u t s i d e C o l o n .
(Waldo)
N a t i v e v i l l a g e at G a t u n . -The v i l l a g e will be razed a nd its site obliterated by th e darn.
T h e r o c k c utting a t Ba s Obispo, t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e Culebra cut.I
VOL. CLXV. No. 985
34
Waldo:
[J. F. I.,
never has been any reasonable doubt about those famo-~s lock foundations at Gatun. F l u r r i e d conjecture in Congress was set at rest, May 2, I9o7, by Messrs. Noble, Stearns and Freeman, when they reported: "\Ve beg to record that we found that all of the locks of the dimensiol~s now proposed will rest upon rock of such a character that should furnish a safe and stable foundation." I saw myself, when I was there last winter, the blue-prints of some five hundred bori~gs taken all over the lock site and the dam site to determine bey(rod peradventure that the dam and the accessory wdrks are not going to shift uneasily upon their b2d so as to undo the work of years and render vain the expenditure of millions. Mr. Ernest H o w e , lhe geologist, makes Some interesting aml iT~structive r e m m k s in the Annual Report, anent the nature of the clay beds at Gatun. H e says: " T h e rocks are all well col~sglidated, thou.~h in a few rare cases sandy layers are fo:_md which crt',.ml~le on exposure to the air. These a,:e the beds that h a v e been referred .~o freqv.ently as 'indurated c i a y s ' The term is a misleading one, si:~ce true clays make up but a small part of the formation: I n d u r a t i o n is a term applied to the l~rocess bv which sandstones or argillaceous rocks are converted into quartzites or slates bv beat or mineralized solutions accomlm~iying the intrusion ,~f igneous nmks. None of these ccmditiop.s exist in the vicinity of Gatun. T h e rocks arc of sedimentary origin a~ld were deposited on the sea bottom at some distance t r o m the shore in the fo:-m of sands and clays• T h e i r subsequeni: h a r d e n i n g il~to rock is tim result of simple cementation by calcareovs solutions con-: t a i n e d in the sea water and t h r o u g h pressure. Certain beds are h a r d e r than others, since the nature of their constitue~ts favored more complete consolidation. T h e beds, however, are not to be ,regarded as unc'onsolidated. T h e y are all 'rock,' t h o u g h in some instances soft enough to be loosened with a pick." At the other cru.r of the project, the Culebra cut, near six million cubic yards of "spoil" were removed in the fiscal year. T h e Culebra division is about t o miles in length, from the Chagres River, which strikes the Canal route amidships, to P e d r o Miguel, on the Pacific side of the continental backbone. Last July. in 2 6 w o r k i n g clays, with 43 shovels at work, 770.57 ° cubic yards were taken out: in A u g u s t (27 w o r k i n g davs and 4o shovels) 786,856 y a r d s : in SeFtember (24 days, 39 shovels), the fiz, ures w'~:'e
: i t !
1
January, I9O8.]
z[~ Panama.
35
753,468. This, it nlust be renlenlbered, was in the lniddle of the April-November rainy season, when the clay sticks to the dunlpcars and the rains send the spur-tracks sliding down the faces of the cut, faster even than Mr. Bierd's wonderful "track-shifter" could transplant them. The magnitude of the engineering achievement under the French regnne will not be depreciated by anyone who has stood on the brink of the cnt and watched the buzzards soaring across the abysmal space between Contractors' and Gold Hill. A seventyton shovel, plastered against the side of the cliff and fighting away for dear life against the mountain wall, looks about as big as a child's toy fire-engine in a shop window seen from across the street. A ninety-five-ton Bucyrus shovel at work, when you are right up close to it, or perhaps sitting on the boom, is, next to a liner full speed ahead at s~a,the most ip.spiring piece of mechanism I know of. You feel fairly afraid that the mighty proboscis and the sharp, gleaming steel tusks on the lip of the shovel may at any moment turn and rend you, jus~ as thev are making ruin there amid the blasted basalt rock and the "indurated" clay. The ropy coils of black smoke wreathe and braid into the lifeless air from the funnel above your head : the machine staggers and rocks upon the rails, and you have to make a nmgaphone of both your hands for a word to the engineer. And out there Oll the boom sits a nlan, paid $19o a month, to pnll the latch-rope at jr, st the right instant so that the right mouthful will be discharged with millimetric exactitude npon the dirt train drowsing beside us in the lmat-shimmer, till it is given its fnll complement for the dnmp, miles distant, maybe. \Vhen you have once seen the performmlce of those shovels, your doubts as to there being a canal some day between those mountain, walls are laid at rest forever. The amount of the excavation at Culebra since the U'nited States took hold of the job (in May, I9o3), is as follows, for the year ending June 3o: I9o 4. 6O, lO7 cubic yards: I9o 5, 74~,644 cubic yards: 19o6, r,5o6,562 cubic yards: 19o 7, 5,768,oi4, m a k - ' ing a total of 8,o76,327 cubic yards. It must be borne in mind that the "lean years" were by no means unproductive, for these years of inconspicuous cubic yardage were the years when the absolutely necessary preliminary lneasures of sanitation, which the French neglected, were undertaken, w h i l e Congress and the newspapers cried out upon the delay in "making the dirt fly." It
36
Waldo:
[J. F. I.,
was not possible to strike the stride at the very beginning, with thousands upon thousa_nds of workmen to be fed and sheltered and acclimated ; with square miles of mosquito-breeding jungle to be mowed away; with a mechanical plant to be installed for the practical solution of an engineeril~g problem of unprecedented
J o h n F. Ste~-enu, Chief J~ngineer, succeeded by Col. Gorgas, A pril, 1907.
magnitude, including the removal of a mountain, picking up a river and throwing it into a basin, and the rebuilding of two cities, all as mere side issues to the main task of creating a strait from sea to sea for more than forty miles. The highest monthly total of output attained by the French at
January, I9o8.l
A t '-Panama.
37
!Culebra was ~o2,25o cubic yards, in February, I886. In April, x9o7, the A ~ e r i c a n engineers got out nearly nine hundred ~[aousand,---exceeding by 75 per cent. the record of the Compagnie Interoceanique. About 5,ooo laborers, including Spaniards (the Gallegas Spaniards whom George Borrow writes about), Italians, blackmen from Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbadoes, and a few American negroes,--worked at the cut during the year. The Spaniards and the Italians got twenty cents an hour (American money) and the negroes ten. The European laborers are nmch better workmen than the blacks. The Jamaicans must be cajoled, they cannot be coerced, to do their work; and the kind of work they do is such as no track-foreman in the States would put up with. They stand very much on their dignity as "British objects," and the talk they can "turn loose" when the occasion arises is to the talk of a white man what the Chagres River in flood would be compared with a canary's bathtub. The question of contract vs. hired labor has been a vexed and Vexing one on the Isthmus. In October, ~co5, proposals were invited from contractors for taking over the complete construction of the canal according to the Government plans ; but upon opening the bids, in January, 19o7, none was found to be entirely satisfactory, and the work was retained under the pre-existing government control. The Commission is of the opinion that no one contracting coneern is equipped to handle the manifold phases of the work at Panama, including not merely excavation, but dredging, dam-building, lock-construction and the relocating of a railroad. It is also represented that the government enjoys a great advantage over any private contractor in international negotiations necessary to secure laborers who are racially and temperamentally fitted for work under peculiarly trying climatic conditions. The Commission repudiates the assertion that contract labor is less likely to exceed a fixed time limit. They cite the experience of the Commission itself in contracting for supplies in the United States, and assert that the contractors have often exceeded the time limits for delivery, which the contractors themselves have set. Speaking of the Culebra work, the Commission says: "Under the circumstances no advantage would accrue to the United States by letting this piece of work to contractors, but on the contrary there would be not only additional expense, but a
Jcurnal Franklin Inslilute, vol. c;a'v, [alHlarv, 1?o3
'1 h e Bot~pit~l~ ('01011.
Pavitlg tile streets, Palaanla.
Waldo )
Bachelor quarters, Culebra.
Ol d V r e n c h b l e k e t d r e ~ l g ( s , Co o n .
40
Waldo:
[j. F I.,
feeling of unrest and dissatisfaction engendered among the present employees materially affecting efficiency. Under existing conditions, therefore, contract work cannot i~e recommended for the Culebra division." The plans for the relocation of the railroad, made necessary in large part by the lake that the Gatun Dam creates, contemplate some two million cubic yards of excavation, and twelve million cubic yards of embankment. The ten million cubic yards of the excess of embankment over excavation will come from the canal prism. A new bridge will be thrown across the swirling current of the Chagres where it elbows to the north at Gamboa. And while at Miraflores and Pedro Miguel and Gamboa and Gatun the new roadbed is being piled into the jungle and the swamp, and the spruce ties from the States and the seventy-pound rails. are being laid, the track will be "red-hot" with spoil-trains of Western dump-cars, and passenger trains crowded with black people in transit along the only thoroughfare. When John F. Stevens was "Chief," somebody commented on the number of wrecks. He answered, "Well, that's a sign there are trains running2' It has often been said that what with the between-ship passenger traffic, the movement of construction gangs, the transport of material, the dump-trains and dirt-cars, the freight of every description, and the official "specials" white-flagging the way traffic ever and anon, there is no busier section of railroad in the United States than the forty-four miles of track constituting the Panama Railroad. Except for a four-mile stretch between Gatun and Lion Hill, the double-tracking of the road has been completed, and a block system has been installed to facilitate the work of the train dispatcher. To take a forward look, the estimate of the appropriation needed for the fiscal year, June 3 o, I9o8-June 3 o, I9o9, is thirty-three million dollars. A committee of the House of Representatives, headed by Congressman Tawney, thinks it has found ways and means of saving a million dollars on this estimate, but, as the New York Su~, has pointed out, the result of the three-day tour of inspection of this party, as compared with the impressive array of facts and figures assembled by the engineers of the Commission, makes a cheeseparing economy appear to be the penny-wise, pound-foolish policy. The Report of the Commission justifies
January, ,9o8.]
A t Panama.
4x
past expenditures, refutes the critics, and confirms the sanguine orophecies that have been made ever since the first explorers "Stared at each other with a wild surmise, Silent upon a peak in Darien." II. The annual ball of the Culebra club, on New Year's Eve, 19o 7, at the Tivoli Hotel, in Panama, was a truly brilliant affair; but at midnight while still "to the trembling string the dance gaed through the lighted hall," we left the lights and the laughter, the chiffon and the sefioritas, and turned in to try to get a little sleep before the Alligator Hunt, which was due to start at 3 A.M. But just before my head sought the pillow, I stepped out on the verandah a moment in the flooding moonlight. Out on the bay the tranquil brilliant lamps of the big tramp steamers made feeble, ineffectual efforts to mock the starry glory of the Southern Cross ; and the arc-lights newly planted along the streets of Panama by los .dmericanos were as if strange constellations had been spilled out upon the land. Up and down the Streets the native population paraded, making night hideous with bull-hide drums and tambours and sputtering strings of firecrackers, to which the steam-whistle of the ice-plant added a wailful and long-drawn-out obligato. At punctually 3 A.M. the black boy beat a rolling tattoo on my door, and I tumbled out. The Captain of Police--who had been up all night quelling chocolate-and-vanilla riots till the exhausted population and the tambours fell asleep over their rum with the gorgeous d a w n - - h a d brought the necessary chariots and horses to take the visiting Americans down to the long wharves at La Boca where the big iron ships, rusty from long voyages, come in to discharge their cargoes, and the eighteen-inch white terredoworms cling with their augur-bit heads sapping away the shortlived creosoted pine timbers. W e drove at a merry rate down the cobbled quagmire of a calle in the outskirts of the town, the black boy yelling at his four horses as they waltzed and chass6e-d at every shadow, and his long whip rained in viewless fireworks about their metal-tagged ears. H e called them all by name; and they whinnied back; and so the talking to aXnd fro betwixt the horses and their driver went
42
Waldo:
[J. F. i,
on, till we rounded the big black mole of La Boca Hill in a swirl ,of dust and came to a hard-breathing pause in the fading moonlight by the stringpiece of the wharf, with the old rotting hulks •of French dredges moored alongside. There the Captain had a big launch ready, the parts of which were sorted out and put together by the canal engineers who found them after the French &;bdcle lying at the top of the Culebra divide anaong a lot of snow-plows! She was a fiftyfooter; and with three negroes sweating away in the engine-pit amidships, she took us at twelve brave knots an hour through the islands of the bay, with the sharks chasing the mullet clear out o f water, and fleeing schools of mackerel, and pelicans sitting in judicial solenmity on the islet reefs to purse up in their pouchy gullets whatever fish went frantically shoreward among the breakers. Twenty-five miles from La Boca, we turned and ran in where the ebb-tide was dragging seaward the drug-store chocolate waters of the Chorrera River. Right at the mile-wide river mouth, to the starboard, lay twenty-five feet of a gray-green lichened log, that seemed visibly to cringe and flatten as we ran in nearer for a :sho'~. The Captain's elephant-gun belched forth like Mount Pel6e, and the niggers danced out of the cockpit to clap their hands and shout, as the saurian hove his front half up on pudgy legs, looked :about him like a gigantic inchworm, uncertain where to lay hold next, and then shambled and slumped off the nmd-flat into the water. The launch hove to at a tiny dock, and we got into four rowboats, with two Jamaica negroes at each oar. It was a long, slow fight for headway against the current. Three corrugated noses, one after another, ferrying across from bank to bank, vanished ripplelessly under when the Captain, standing in the prow, spoke to them with the elephant-gun. And yet the Captain was . not satisfied. " J u s t wait till we get around the big bend of the river, boys," he said, "I'll show you a happy hunting-ground then !" But the big bend might as well have been Cape Horn, so far as our efforts to get around it were concerned. Just here, a reef of oyster-clad rocks ran ont into the river, ahnost from bank to bank, and in the interstices the water colnbed through, nine miles
January, I9O8.]
A t Panama.
43
,an hour. The water-dogs ran out of the thickets to watch us and the paroquets gabbled like gramaphones, and even the buzzards seemed to pause mid-air in their hovering flight, when then saw we could gain no painful inch, and stood practically still amid-stream, with the noon s u n blazing down. But our voices disappointed the carrion-hunting birds, in their hopes of finding lifelessness where we wei-e. "All out on the rocks !" commanded the Captain, and then to the blacks he said, peremptorily, "Take out the guns and the grub, and lift the boat over." Even then it was not easy. There were bleeding feet among the thwarts when we got in again,--and bleeding han~.ls, too, for those who tampered with the sharp-edged oysters, thinking to make a luscious meal. But with hurrahs and yells we swept gradually round the bend, all four boats abreast, and t h e n - - " B y Jupiter !" shouted tim Captain. On a wide, flat mud-bank to the left was a leviathan convention of about twenty-five (there are those who insist on at least two hundred). The patriarch of the lot lay like a fallen live-oak bearded with Spanish moss and lichens, entrusted with barnacles, hoary with eld. The rest, nestling in his lee, reminded one of a wrecking company's tugs trying to rescue a stranded ocean steamer. Then it was like the \¥ild West Show when the Deadwood coach comes in--everyone banging and blazing away in utter disregard of his neighbor,--a dozen 44-caliber Marlin rifles bringing down green cocoanuts on the bank, nicking the bark from floating logs, ruining rare orchids, and driving the astonished sandpipers to their nests among the reeds--only the Captain, standing in the prow of the foremost boat with his elephant gun at his shoulder, his bronzed face impassive, trying to marshal the ague-stricken little army of marksmen, was doing any real execution. Suddenly there was a stir in the bushes, and a big alligator waddled down the bank toward the Captain's boat, her lower jaw wagging and clapping like the lid of the bucket of one of the ninety-five ton steam shovels in the rock-cutting at Culebra. The Congressman from California poked the nose of his kodak between the Captain's legs. On came the saurian, and the Congressman from California pressed the button again and again. At the last minute, just as the indignant lady 'gator was about to climb into the boat and rebuke the kodak-fiend emphatically, the
44
[J. F. I.,
Notes and Comments.
Captain fired. The 'gator rolled ov~er into the water, squirming in death agonies, lashing the water ihto a bloody froth with her ten-foot tail. "Now, get out there with a rope," yelled the Captain to the bow oarsman, "and make a slipnoose round the upper jaw, and drag 'er ashore !" The elephant gun spoke again,--she would have dislocated ar~ ordinarily strong man's shoulder with every one of her r e m a r k s , - and by the time the boatman's noose was ready the great beast lay quite dead with her back humped out of the shoal water, making a little lagoon betwixt herself and the shore. The Congressman from California crawled out from betweer~ the Captain's legs, and a black bottle with a garish label came rapidly his way from the bowels of the boat. I saw the photographs afterward, when the Congressman developed t h e m - - o r it. For it is all one picture. He forgot in his excitement, to unroll the film after pressing the button, and there are more alligators in the composite photograph than there were in the entire herd when the Wild West Show began.
BY-PRODUCT
COKE
FOR
DOMESTIC
FIRES.
In a p a p e r read by Paul Schlicht before the Society of A r t s at Londorr, May 8, an earnest plea was made for the use of coke in domestic fires, a n d particularly for coke made in b y - p r o d u c t ovens, by which certain quantities of inflaanmable gas are left in the fuel, r e n d e r i n g it m o r e flaming t h a n t h a t t u r n e d out in the o r d i n a r y way. T h e use of b i t u m i n o u s coal in d o m e s tic fires was c o n d e m n e d as b e i n g very wasteful, for a b o u t fourteen times t h e air necessary to b u r n the coal was generally sent out the chimney. This i~ i m p r e g n a t e d with s t e a m and sulphuric acid, as well as with particles of carbon, which produced fog. I n addition t o this, in the c o n s u m p t i o n of every ton of coal Ioo lbs. of coal tar are destroyed; also m a n y v a l u a b l e c o n s t i t u e n t s useful in the arts and in medicine, besides oils useful f o r l i g h t i n g and m o t o r purposes, t o g e t h e r ~ i t h solids t h a t m i g h t be employed in road-making. If in place of such form of c o m b u s t i o n the coal were t r e a t e d in the m o d e r n b y - p r o d u c t oven, t h e r e would be, in addition to t h e p r o d u c t s named, a b o u t fourteen cwt. of coke, suitable for do,mestic a n d metallurgical purposes. F l a m i n g coke can be made in the b y - p r o d u c t ovens in from four to five h o u r s less time t h a n the low volatile coke required for metallurgical purposes, a certain p e r c e n t a g e of h y d r o g e n a n d h y d r o c a r b o n s b e i n g allowed to r e m a i n in the coke.--Eng, and M&. Jour~
.4t Panama.
27
At Panama." BY FULLERTON L. WALDO, F.R.G.S.
Lieut.-Col. Ge,~rge \V. Goethals, U. S. A., Cllief Fmgilleer of the Isthmian Caual Commission, rel)orted on December 4 to the \:\;ashington office of tile Comnlission that the total excavation for November was t,838,486 cubic yards, making a daily average for 24 working days of 76,6oo cubic yards, lgive cubic yards of earth and rock, such as the great ninety-five-ton thmvrus shovels grub u 1) at a single bite, after the side of a hill has been "shot" or blasted, weigh from seven to nine tons, so that it is safe to say timt a daily average of something like I2O,OOO tons is being hauled seaward on the rocking Western dunlp cars or being plowed off by the Lidgerwood unloaders from the dirt-trains into the abysmal reek of primeval morasses and the jungle. The l"rench, at their best, were taking out something like ~,5oo,ooo cubic yards a month, twenty years ago. So that in actual cubic yardage we are exceedip.g the achievement of our predecessors, and the prol)hecy, which a year ago seemed over-sanguine, that the canal would be ready for commemorative expositions at Los Angeles and New Orleans in 1913, bids fair to be fulfilled. One of the most interesting books that has ever been written ~m the Panama Canal is the Report, just issued, of the Canal Commission for the year ending June 3 ° , 19o 7 . The pictures bring the graphic exposition of the conditions nluch more nearly down to the present date (some bearing the legend Sel)tenlber Io, I9o7), and nlake plain the connection between paving and selfrespect in the cities; between the adequate housing of the work*A lecture delivered before the Franklin Institute, Friday, November a9th, t9c7.
a8
I~'aldo:
[J. F. I.,
ing-corps and a degree of contentment hitherto supposed to be unrealizable on the part of Northerners living in the tropics; bet w e e n an adequate supply of filtered water and mortality-rates that would be the pride of a New York or Philadelphia Board of Health. No before-and-after-taking advertisement could exhibit nlore sudden or surprising metamorphoses than thisAnnual Report represents, and the result of its perusal must be to establish unshakeably the confidence of the reader in the Work and in the men who are doing the work. If other evidence were needed that the dirt is flying and that the filth has flown,--that the Isthmus is livable for white men,--that while the great dam at Gatun slowly but surely rises against the chocolate torrent of the Chagres, and the giant cleft in the hills at Culebra grows steadily wider and deeper, the children are going to school and women are marketing nmch as they do at h o m e - - i f one wants additional evidence that the American community has transferred American institutions to the Isthmus little altered, one has only to read every week the pages of the Canal Record. There he will find the unbiased chronicle of the life of the thirty thousand people of~ the working community. He will learn there how the surveyors in the Chagres Valley have come upon a little French village under the bc/ucca vines and the white orchils, with machine shops whose clinking and purring tools have given place to the strident voices of the paroquets and the jabber of monkeys. H e will learn there of judges and lawyers soberly holding court for undesirable citizens and metitag out even-handed American justice. H e will find contract vs. day labor discussed, and the scores of a woman's bridge-whist club duly held up for emulation. H e will learn of Japanese teas and Spanish classes, baseball and bowling alleys, and Thanksgiving pumpkin pie. There are "letters from the line," about how small boys scraped the frost from the pipes of the cold-storage plant and snow-balled each other,--about a challenge to a walking match across the Isthmus, or the Continent, if you like, some 44 miles of distance,--about the establishment of fraternal orders, with much band music and lemonade. There is one wistful colunm of the names of those who are going back to God's own country by the constant shuttle of the steamships,--a wistfulness tempered by the welcome extended to those who are coming back to the Istlmms again, after the tong vacations granted every employee.
January, I9o8.]
A t Panama.
29,
It is good to read about all this, but it is still better to have been down there and to have seen for one's self how things are going, as it is the writers privilege to have been and to have seen, last winter. Those who have seen Dwight Elmendorf's lectures with theilaccessories of motion and color, need in addition little more tl{an six months of dry heat followed by six months of supersaturation, to realize what life at Panama is like. The ahonfinable climate that makes garden vegetables as difficult to raise as little children-that often pulls down the white man's capacity for "virtuous energizing" to the low level of the black man's vegetative existence--that brings green mold on books and ants into the woodwork, and makes taut fiddle-strings impossible--even this climate, if you live as Dr. Gorgas lives, who follows the rules and obeys. the laws of tropic nature,--becomes tolerable. That is the first thing, of course, that the new-comer broods about--he is obsessed by fear that the climate will sap and undernfine his energy an~t leave him a prey to Chagres fever or elephantiasis. How do the statistics of Dr. Gorgas' latest health report justify the apprehension ? "The sick rate for September," Dr. Gorgas reports, "was 27.78 per thousand, and for August 29.o2--a decrease o f nearly 2 for September as compared with August. The same rate for September, I9o6 , was 37 per thousand. "The number of employees on our rolls on the Ist of Septemberw.as the largest that has so far appeared on the rolls of the Commission--slightly over 4~,ooo. In September, I9O6, we had something over 28,ooo employees. Among these 28,000 employees we had i35 deaths, which gave us an annual death rate o f a little over 57. In September, I9o7, we had 4I,ooo employees, with 98 deaths, giving us an annual death rate of a little over 28 per thousand--quite a marked improvement. " A m o n g our 4,2oo American employees we had two deaths,. giving us an annual death rate of 5.71--about the same as last year. "In September, I9o5, the total population of the zone was 76,000, from which population we had 35 ° deaths, giving us an annual death rate of a little over 54 per thousand. In September, I9O7, the zone population was Io8,ooo, in which population we had 297 deaths, giving us an annual rate of a little over 32 per
.3 °
H"ahto:
[J. F. I.,
thousand, showing a very marked improvenmnt in the death rate, both of the laboring force and the general population. " N o case of either small-pox or yellow fever occurred on the zone during the month." So much for the health of the zone--that ten-mile wide strip which includes the axial line of the Canal and is deflected at either end to skip the cities of Colon and Panama, but not the American suburbs of these cities,--Cristobal and Ancon. Cristohal is a delightful place,--like Manhattan Beach, it is swept by ocean breezes, when there are any; it has an ice plant and cold storage and a steam laundry and a bakery of its own, and the cellarless houses reared on posts, and covered from top to battom with wire gauze against alzo/,hdcs and stegomyia--these houses, cleanly and airy. shed the tropic rains from their corrugated roofs, and the l)~Wous s~il beneath s~aks up the flooding waters, and there are 1> p, mkets f(~r standiug drainage where mosquito larv~ breed. A shell 1-~ad in front, and the indolent windmill-arms of the cocoanut pahns overhead, and the open roadstead of lnud-hrown shallow water, with the red and rnsted tramp steamers lying at anchor off the raihvav pier--this is the 'long-shore picture; and just behind you. beside the raihvav track, are the freight yards, and giant scare-crows of the coal unloaders, and the Mount Hope storehouses, partially destroyed by fire the first of last April. And there is the "Monkey Hill Cemetery," with red zinnias abloom, newly-christened Mount Hope, so that people will forget the horrid stcwies of the French regime, and how the crew of the daily dead-train dumped the corpses out of the coffins upon the hilMde, and sohl the coffins again. And beyond that still, is the mighty Reservoir. which Poultney Bigelow could not find, and where the launch named for him is tethered to the bank. The water-w~wks system of Colon, which this Mount Hope Reservoir supplies, is n~w complete. About five miles of sewer pipe were laid in the year covered by the Annual Report. Seventy-five house connections have been made with the water pipe, 4~4 service 1,~xes and ~e2 lneters installed. The Mount Hope Reserv~fir. which was completed in December, I9o6, has a capacity of 435,ooo,ooo gall,ms. In watering and paving the cities of Colon and Panama ~he United States has thus far expended $I,75o,ooo, which is t,-~ be reimbursed by the two municipalities from waterrates collected. I n the city of Panama last year some two and a-
January, I9o8.]
A i [~(tlt(tllt(t.
3I
half miles of water pipes were laid, 2,o93 houses were connected therewifll, two million vitrified brick from Dubuque, Iowa, were laid in the streets, and now Panama claims the proud distinction o f being the best-paved city between Buenos Ayres and the City of Mexico, with twenty gallons of water per (lay supplied for each of its inhai',itants---many of who,u have little or no use for it. Y,t C,21on. where much of tile land is only a matter of a few inches above the water, arm the soil is a seeping, porous sponge, dredges in the chamlel are doing most of the work. The dredging fleet coral)rises one of the old French ladder dredges, a fiveyard dipper dredge, and a sixteen-inch suction dredge; more recently, a sea-going suction dredge, like the big dredges in New York Harll~)r, has been doing yeoman service, addiug between three and f~ur lmndred tllousand cubic yards a month to the sum total. Before this recent acquisition, the excavation for the fiscal year at Colon was eleven hundred thousand cubic yards. At Gatun, where the railway line lnnst be relocated to swing clear of tile vast mass of tile dam, is one of the two great present centers of activity, the other being the heart of the Culel)ra cut. As everyb~My knows, this (lain at Gatun is what the schoolboy would call "the biggest ever." ~[tiS not really a dam; it is a hill or mole, ~r barrow of earth, such as the Ohio 1hound-builders would have clapped their hands to behold. For a mile and a-half in width it is to reach across the valley, clamping it from hill to hill, and its base a half-mile through, will obliterate the site of the ralnshackle, pahn-thatched, native village of Gatun, with its little g r a y Catholic church. The United States will lift those poor little sentry-box houses to the hills, or else rebuild before the village m(~ving-day. And by that great earth-barrow, whose dilnensions are only approached, but not equalled, by a couple of earth-dams in California, an immense lake will be created, as the whole world knows, with the top of the dam, a hundred yards wide, fifty feet above the surface of the water at the eighty-fivefoot level. Tile three locks at Gatun are in pairs; the present (limensions are Iooox~oo feet, and there is nmch talk of widening. On the •other side of the Isthmus this lock-flight is counterbalanced by the lift at Pedro Miguel and the two locks at La Boca. "File design is simple enough, and the engineering problem at Panama presents quantitative rather than qualitative difficulties. There
]ournal Franklin Inslilule, vol. clxv, January, I9o8
F l o o d of D e c e m b e r 8,1907, on t h e l i n e of tile F a n a m a R. i t . a t F a r a i s o .
F r e i g h t y a r d s at M o u n t H o p e . j u s t o u t s i d e C o l o n .
(Waldo)
N a t i v e v i l l a g e at G a t u n . -The v i l l a g e will be razed a nd its site obliterated by th e darn.
T h e r o c k c utting a t Ba s Obispo, t h e b e g i n n i n g of t h e Culebra cut.I
VOL. CLXV. No. 985
34
Waldo:
[J. F. I.,
never has been any reasonable doubt about those famo-~s lock foundations at Gatun. F l u r r i e d conjecture in Congress was set at rest, May 2, I9o7, by Messrs. Noble, Stearns and Freeman, when they reported: "\Ve beg to record that we found that all of the locks of the dimensiol~s now proposed will rest upon rock of such a character that should furnish a safe and stable foundation." I saw myself, when I was there last winter, the blue-prints of some five hundred bori~gs taken all over the lock site and the dam site to determine bey(rod peradventure that the dam and the accessory wdrks are not going to shift uneasily upon their b2d so as to undo the work of years and render vain the expenditure of millions. Mr. Ernest H o w e , lhe geologist, makes Some interesting aml iT~structive r e m m k s in the Annual Report, anent the nature of the clay beds at Gatun. H e says: " T h e rocks are all well col~sglidated, thou.~h in a few rare cases sandy layers are fo:_md which crt',.ml~le on exposure to the air. These a,:e the beds that h a v e been referred .~o freqv.ently as 'indurated c i a y s ' The term is a misleading one, si:~ce true clays make up but a small part of the formation: I n d u r a t i o n is a term applied to the l~rocess bv which sandstones or argillaceous rocks are converted into quartzites or slates bv beat or mineralized solutions accomlm~iying the intrusion ,~f igneous nmks. None of these ccmditiop.s exist in the vicinity of Gatun. T h e rocks arc of sedimentary origin a~ld were deposited on the sea bottom at some distance t r o m the shore in the fo:-m of sands and clays• T h e i r subsequeni: h a r d e n i n g il~to rock is tim result of simple cementation by calcareovs solutions con-: t a i n e d in the sea water and t h r o u g h pressure. Certain beds are h a r d e r than others, since the nature of their constitue~ts favored more complete consolidation. T h e beds, however, are not to be ,regarded as unc'onsolidated. T h e y are all 'rock,' t h o u g h in some instances soft enough to be loosened with a pick." At the other cru.r of the project, the Culebra cut, near six million cubic yards of "spoil" were removed in the fiscal year. T h e Culebra division is about t o miles in length, from the Chagres River, which strikes the Canal route amidships, to P e d r o Miguel, on the Pacific side of the continental backbone. Last July. in 2 6 w o r k i n g clays, with 43 shovels at work, 770.57 ° cubic yards were taken out: in A u g u s t (27 w o r k i n g davs and 4o shovels) 786,856 y a r d s : in SeFtember (24 days, 39 shovels), the fiz, ures w'~:'e
: i t !
1
January, I9O8.]
z[~ Panama.
35
753,468. This, it nlust be renlenlbered, was in the lniddle of the April-November rainy season, when the clay sticks to the dunlpcars and the rains send the spur-tracks sliding down the faces of the cut, faster even than Mr. Bierd's wonderful "track-shifter" could transplant them. The magnitude of the engineering achievement under the French regnne will not be depreciated by anyone who has stood on the brink of the cnt and watched the buzzards soaring across the abysmal space between Contractors' and Gold Hill. A seventyton shovel, plastered against the side of the cliff and fighting away for dear life against the mountain wall, looks about as big as a child's toy fire-engine in a shop window seen from across the street. A ninety-five-ton Bucyrus shovel at work, when you are right up close to it, or perhaps sitting on the boom, is, next to a liner full speed ahead at s~a,the most ip.spiring piece of mechanism I know of. You feel fairly afraid that the mighty proboscis and the sharp, gleaming steel tusks on the lip of the shovel may at any moment turn and rend you, jus~ as thev are making ruin there amid the blasted basalt rock and the "indurated" clay. The ropy coils of black smoke wreathe and braid into the lifeless air from the funnel above your head : the machine staggers and rocks upon the rails, and you have to make a nmgaphone of both your hands for a word to the engineer. And out there Oll the boom sits a nlan, paid $19o a month, to pnll the latch-rope at jr, st the right instant so that the right mouthful will be discharged with millimetric exactitude npon the dirt train drowsing beside us in the lmat-shimmer, till it is given its fnll complement for the dnmp, miles distant, maybe. \Vhen you have once seen the performmlce of those shovels, your doubts as to there being a canal some day between those mountain, walls are laid at rest forever. The amount of the excavation at Culebra since the U'nited States took hold of the job (in May, I9o3), is as follows, for the year ending June 3o: I9o 4. 6O, lO7 cubic yards: I9o 5, 74~,644 cubic yards: 19o6, r,5o6,562 cubic yards: 19o 7, 5,768,oi4, m a k - ' ing a total of 8,o76,327 cubic yards. It must be borne in mind that the "lean years" were by no means unproductive, for these years of inconspicuous cubic yardage were the years when the absolutely necessary preliminary lneasures of sanitation, which the French neglected, were undertaken, w h i l e Congress and the newspapers cried out upon the delay in "making the dirt fly." It
36
Waldo:
[J. F. I.,
was not possible to strike the stride at the very beginning, with thousands upon thousa_nds of workmen to be fed and sheltered and acclimated ; with square miles of mosquito-breeding jungle to be mowed away; with a mechanical plant to be installed for the practical solution of an engineeril~g problem of unprecedented
J o h n F. Ste~-enu, Chief J~ngineer, succeeded by Col. Gorgas, A pril, 1907.
magnitude, including the removal of a mountain, picking up a river and throwing it into a basin, and the rebuilding of two cities, all as mere side issues to the main task of creating a strait from sea to sea for more than forty miles. The highest monthly total of output attained by the French at
January, I9o8.l
A t '-Panama.
37
!Culebra was ~o2,25o cubic yards, in February, I886. In April, x9o7, the A ~ e r i c a n engineers got out nearly nine hundred ~[aousand,---exceeding by 75 per cent. the record of the Compagnie Interoceanique. About 5,ooo laborers, including Spaniards (the Gallegas Spaniards whom George Borrow writes about), Italians, blackmen from Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbadoes, and a few American negroes,--worked at the cut during the year. The Spaniards and the Italians got twenty cents an hour (American money) and the negroes ten. The European laborers are nmch better workmen than the blacks. The Jamaicans must be cajoled, they cannot be coerced, to do their work; and the kind of work they do is such as no track-foreman in the States would put up with. They stand very much on their dignity as "British objects," and the talk they can "turn loose" when the occasion arises is to the talk of a white man what the Chagres River in flood would be compared with a canary's bathtub. The question of contract vs. hired labor has been a vexed and Vexing one on the Isthmus. In October, ~co5, proposals were invited from contractors for taking over the complete construction of the canal according to the Government plans ; but upon opening the bids, in January, 19o7, none was found to be entirely satisfactory, and the work was retained under the pre-existing government control. The Commission is of the opinion that no one contracting coneern is equipped to handle the manifold phases of the work at Panama, including not merely excavation, but dredging, dam-building, lock-construction and the relocating of a railroad. It is also represented that the government enjoys a great advantage over any private contractor in international negotiations necessary to secure laborers who are racially and temperamentally fitted for work under peculiarly trying climatic conditions. The Commission repudiates the assertion that contract labor is less likely to exceed a fixed time limit. They cite the experience of the Commission itself in contracting for supplies in the United States, and assert that the contractors have often exceeded the time limits for delivery, which the contractors themselves have set. Speaking of the Culebra work, the Commission says: "Under the circumstances no advantage would accrue to the United States by letting this piece of work to contractors, but on the contrary there would be not only additional expense, but a
Jcurnal Franklin Inslilute, vol. c;a'v, [alHlarv, 1?o3
'1 h e Bot~pit~l~ ('01011.
Pavitlg tile streets, Palaanla.
Waldo )
Bachelor quarters, Culebra.
Ol d V r e n c h b l e k e t d r e ~ l g ( s , Co o n .
40
Waldo:
[j. F I.,
feeling of unrest and dissatisfaction engendered among the present employees materially affecting efficiency. Under existing conditions, therefore, contract work cannot i~e recommended for the Culebra division." The plans for the relocation of the railroad, made necessary in large part by the lake that the Gatun Dam creates, contemplate some two million cubic yards of excavation, and twelve million cubic yards of embankment. The ten million cubic yards of the excess of embankment over excavation will come from the canal prism. A new bridge will be thrown across the swirling current of the Chagres where it elbows to the north at Gamboa. And while at Miraflores and Pedro Miguel and Gamboa and Gatun the new roadbed is being piled into the jungle and the swamp, and the spruce ties from the States and the seventy-pound rails. are being laid, the track will be "red-hot" with spoil-trains of Western dump-cars, and passenger trains crowded with black people in transit along the only thoroughfare. When John F. Stevens was "Chief," somebody commented on the number of wrecks. He answered, "Well, that's a sign there are trains running2' It has often been said that what with the between-ship passenger traffic, the movement of construction gangs, the transport of material, the dump-trains and dirt-cars, the freight of every description, and the official "specials" white-flagging the way traffic ever and anon, there is no busier section of railroad in the United States than the forty-four miles of track constituting the Panama Railroad. Except for a four-mile stretch between Gatun and Lion Hill, the double-tracking of the road has been completed, and a block system has been installed to facilitate the work of the train dispatcher. To take a forward look, the estimate of the appropriation needed for the fiscal year, June 3 o, I9o8-June 3 o, I9o9, is thirty-three million dollars. A committee of the House of Representatives, headed by Congressman Tawney, thinks it has found ways and means of saving a million dollars on this estimate, but, as the New York Su~, has pointed out, the result of the three-day tour of inspection of this party, as compared with the impressive array of facts and figures assembled by the engineers of the Commission, makes a cheeseparing economy appear to be the penny-wise, pound-foolish policy. The Report of the Commission justifies
January, ,9o8.]
A t Panama.
4x
past expenditures, refutes the critics, and confirms the sanguine orophecies that have been made ever since the first explorers "Stared at each other with a wild surmise, Silent upon a peak in Darien." II. The annual ball of the Culebra club, on New Year's Eve, 19o 7, at the Tivoli Hotel, in Panama, was a truly brilliant affair; but at midnight while still "to the trembling string the dance gaed through the lighted hall," we left the lights and the laughter, the chiffon and the sefioritas, and turned in to try to get a little sleep before the Alligator Hunt, which was due to start at 3 A.M. But just before my head sought the pillow, I stepped out on the verandah a moment in the flooding moonlight. Out on the bay the tranquil brilliant lamps of the big tramp steamers made feeble, ineffectual efforts to mock the starry glory of the Southern Cross ; and the arc-lights newly planted along the streets of Panama by los .dmericanos were as if strange constellations had been spilled out upon the land. Up and down the Streets the native population paraded, making night hideous with bull-hide drums and tambours and sputtering strings of firecrackers, to which the steam-whistle of the ice-plant added a wailful and long-drawn-out obligato. At punctually 3 A.M. the black boy beat a rolling tattoo on my door, and I tumbled out. The Captain of Police--who had been up all night quelling chocolate-and-vanilla riots till the exhausted population and the tambours fell asleep over their rum with the gorgeous d a w n - - h a d brought the necessary chariots and horses to take the visiting Americans down to the long wharves at La Boca where the big iron ships, rusty from long voyages, come in to discharge their cargoes, and the eighteen-inch white terredoworms cling with their augur-bit heads sapping away the shortlived creosoted pine timbers. W e drove at a merry rate down the cobbled quagmire of a calle in the outskirts of the town, the black boy yelling at his four horses as they waltzed and chass6e-d at every shadow, and his long whip rained in viewless fireworks about their metal-tagged ears. H e called them all by name; and they whinnied back; and so the talking to aXnd fro betwixt the horses and their driver went
42
Waldo:
[J. F. i,
on, till we rounded the big black mole of La Boca Hill in a swirl ,of dust and came to a hard-breathing pause in the fading moonlight by the stringpiece of the wharf, with the old rotting hulks •of French dredges moored alongside. There the Captain had a big launch ready, the parts of which were sorted out and put together by the canal engineers who found them after the French &;bdcle lying at the top of the Culebra divide anaong a lot of snow-plows! She was a fiftyfooter; and with three negroes sweating away in the engine-pit amidships, she took us at twelve brave knots an hour through the islands of the bay, with the sharks chasing the mullet clear out o f water, and fleeing schools of mackerel, and pelicans sitting in judicial solenmity on the islet reefs to purse up in their pouchy gullets whatever fish went frantically shoreward among the breakers. Twenty-five miles from La Boca, we turned and ran in where the ebb-tide was dragging seaward the drug-store chocolate waters of the Chorrera River. Right at the mile-wide river mouth, to the starboard, lay twenty-five feet of a gray-green lichened log, that seemed visibly to cringe and flatten as we ran in nearer for a :sho'~. The Captain's elephant-gun belched forth like Mount Pel6e, and the niggers danced out of the cockpit to clap their hands and shout, as the saurian hove his front half up on pudgy legs, looked :about him like a gigantic inchworm, uncertain where to lay hold next, and then shambled and slumped off the nmd-flat into the water. The launch hove to at a tiny dock, and we got into four rowboats, with two Jamaica negroes at each oar. It was a long, slow fight for headway against the current. Three corrugated noses, one after another, ferrying across from bank to bank, vanished ripplelessly under when the Captain, standing in the prow, spoke to them with the elephant-gun. And yet the Captain was . not satisfied. " J u s t wait till we get around the big bend of the river, boys," he said, "I'll show you a happy hunting-ground then !" But the big bend might as well have been Cape Horn, so far as our efforts to get around it were concerned. Just here, a reef of oyster-clad rocks ran ont into the river, ahnost from bank to bank, and in the interstices the water colnbed through, nine miles
January, I9O8.]
A t Panama.
43
,an hour. The water-dogs ran out of the thickets to watch us and the paroquets gabbled like gramaphones, and even the buzzards seemed to pause mid-air in their hovering flight, when then saw we could gain no painful inch, and stood practically still amid-stream, with the noon s u n blazing down. But our voices disappointed the carrion-hunting birds, in their hopes of finding lifelessness where we wei-e. "All out on the rocks !" commanded the Captain, and then to the blacks he said, peremptorily, "Take out the guns and the grub, and lift the boat over." Even then it was not easy. There were bleeding feet among the thwarts when we got in again,--and bleeding han~.ls, too, for those who tampered with the sharp-edged oysters, thinking to make a luscious meal. But with hurrahs and yells we swept gradually round the bend, all four boats abreast, and t h e n - - " B y Jupiter !" shouted tim Captain. On a wide, flat mud-bank to the left was a leviathan convention of about twenty-five (there are those who insist on at least two hundred). The patriarch of the lot lay like a fallen live-oak bearded with Spanish moss and lichens, entrusted with barnacles, hoary with eld. The rest, nestling in his lee, reminded one of a wrecking company's tugs trying to rescue a stranded ocean steamer. Then it was like the \¥ild West Show when the Deadwood coach comes in--everyone banging and blazing away in utter disregard of his neighbor,--a dozen 44-caliber Marlin rifles bringing down green cocoanuts on the bank, nicking the bark from floating logs, ruining rare orchids, and driving the astonished sandpipers to their nests among the reeds--only the Captain, standing in the prow of the foremost boat with his elephant gun at his shoulder, his bronzed face impassive, trying to marshal the ague-stricken little army of marksmen, was doing any real execution. Suddenly there was a stir in the bushes, and a big alligator waddled down the bank toward the Captain's boat, her lower jaw wagging and clapping like the lid of the bucket of one of the ninety-five ton steam shovels in the rock-cutting at Culebra. The Congressman from California poked the nose of his kodak between the Captain's legs. On came the saurian, and the Congressman from California pressed the button again and again. At the last minute, just as the indignant lady 'gator was about to climb into the boat and rebuke the kodak-fiend emphatically, the
44
[J. F. I.,
Notes and Comments.
Captain fired. The 'gator rolled ov~er into the water, squirming in death agonies, lashing the water ihto a bloody froth with her ten-foot tail. "Now, get out there with a rope," yelled the Captain to the bow oarsman, "and make a slipnoose round the upper jaw, and drag 'er ashore !" The elephant gun spoke again,--she would have dislocated ar~ ordinarily strong man's shoulder with every one of her r e m a r k s , - and by the time the boatman's noose was ready the great beast lay quite dead with her back humped out of the shoal water, making a little lagoon betwixt herself and the shore. The Congressman from California crawled out from betweer~ the Captain's legs, and a black bottle with a garish label came rapidly his way from the bowels of the boat. I saw the photographs afterward, when the Congressman developed t h e m - - o r it. For it is all one picture. He forgot in his excitement, to unroll the film after pressing the button, and there are more alligators in the composite photograph than there were in the entire herd when the Wild West Show began.
BY-PRODUCT
COKE
FOR
DOMESTIC
FIRES.
In a p a p e r read by Paul Schlicht before the Society of A r t s at Londorr, May 8, an earnest plea was made for the use of coke in domestic fires, a n d particularly for coke made in b y - p r o d u c t ovens, by which certain quantities of inflaanmable gas are left in the fuel, r e n d e r i n g it m o r e flaming t h a n t h a t t u r n e d out in the o r d i n a r y way. T h e use of b i t u m i n o u s coal in d o m e s tic fires was c o n d e m n e d as b e i n g very wasteful, for a b o u t fourteen times t h e air necessary to b u r n the coal was generally sent out the chimney. This i~ i m p r e g n a t e d with s t e a m and sulphuric acid, as well as with particles of carbon, which produced fog. I n addition t o this, in the c o n s u m p t i o n of every ton of coal Ioo lbs. of coal tar are destroyed; also m a n y v a l u a b l e c o n s t i t u e n t s useful in the arts and in medicine, besides oils useful f o r l i g h t i n g and m o t o r purposes, t o g e t h e r ~ i t h solids t h a t m i g h t be employed in road-making. If in place of such form of c o m b u s t i o n the coal were t r e a t e d in the m o d e r n b y - p r o d u c t oven, t h e r e would be, in addition to t h e p r o d u c t s named, a b o u t fourteen cwt. of coke, suitable for do,mestic a n d metallurgical purposes. F l a m i n g coke can be made in the b y - p r o d u c t ovens in from four to five h o u r s less time t h a n the low volatile coke required for metallurgical purposes, a certain p e r c e n t a g e of h y d r o g e n a n d h y d r o c a r b o n s b e i n g allowed to r e m a i n in the coke.--Eng, and M&. Jour~